The 17th Workshop on Social and Human Aspects of Business Process Management (BPMS2’24)
As part of BPM 2024,

1 September 2024, Krakow, Poland

Call for Papers

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: June 7, 2024

Workshop Theme
The social and human aspects of Business Process Management (BPM) refer to the consideration of people within the framework of BPM practices. This encompasses how individuals interact with each other within business processes, how they are affected by those processes, and how their behavior and social interactions influence the design, management, and improvement of business processes. Here are a few key points:

Human-Centric BPM:
At its core, BPM involves people. While processes can be automated, it's essential to design them with the users in mind, ensuring they are intuitive, efficient, and improve the work experience. This might involve ergonomic considerations, user experience design, and the reduction of cognitive load. AI-based assistants like ChatGPT and Alexa offer intuitive conversational interfaces, simplifying human interaction with business processes. The declarative interface of these assistants allows users to state outcomes rather than processes, placing the complexity of business process execution on AI, not the user. AI-based assistants consolidate multiple services and information sources to fulfil diverse user requests efficiently. AI assistants personalize interactions and adapt to user preferences, enhancing satisfaction and engagement.

Social Interactions and Platforms
Processes often require collaboration and communication between different stakeholders. Understanding the dynamics of these social interactions can help design processes that facilitate better teamwork, information exchange, and decision-making. Platforms, particularly social platforms, play a pivotal role in enabling these interactions by fostering environments ripe for value creation. They catalyze weak ties, which connect participants flexibly and dynamically, facilitating the flow of information and innovation across the network. This can result in the organic, bottom-up definition of business processes instead of rigid, top-down approaches.
Social production, encouraged by these platforms, allows for collective content creation and problem-solving, harnessing the diverse strengths and insights of a wide user base. It empowers individuals to contribute to the process design, leading to more robust and widely accepted processes. Additionally, the egalitarian nature of social platforms democratizes decision-making. Decisions can emerge from the collective rather than being handed down from a central authority, leading to more equitable and effective process outcomes. Incorporating these value-creating interactions opens new avenues for process design, bringing forth a more adaptable and innovative approach to BPM. It also signifies a shift in the involvement of human beings in BPM, moving towards more participatory, inclusive, and collaborative roles. This evolution reflects a broader trend in organizational design, where processes are becoming more human-centric and aligned with the principles of social business.

Organizational Culture
The adoption of new processes or the transformation of existing ones often requires changes in the organizational culture. Addressing human aspects involves managing the change process, including training, support, and addressing resistance to change. Effective BPM requires strong leadership and engagement at all levels of the organization. Leaders must understand the social dynamics of their teams to foster a culture that supports continuous process improvement. Understanding what motivates employees and designing processes that align with these motivators can improve job satisfaction and performance. This includes considering incentives and rewards systems. As processes evolve, so must the skills of the people who execute them. A focus on training, personal development, and knowledge management is crucial.

Ethical Considerations, Diversity and Inclusion
BPM must be guided by ethical principles, ensuring that processes are fair, transparent, and do not exploit or discriminate against any group of people. Processes should be designed to be inclusive, considering the needs of a diverse workforce and customer base. The natural interaction with digital assistants makes business processes more accessible to all users, promoting inclusivity.

Human-Centric BPM Design: Exploring ergonomic considerations, user experience, and cognitive load reduction in process automation.
AI in BPM: The role of AI-based assistants in simplifying interactions and personalizing user experience within BPM.
Social Interaction in BPM: Analyzing how social dynamics influence process design for improved teamwork and decision-making.
Platform-Facilitated Collaboration: The impact of social platforms on creating flexible, dynamic networks for BPM.
Social Production and Process Design: Investigating collective content creation and bottom-up process definition through participatory platforms.
Democratic Process Management: The effects of egalitarian decision-making in BPM facilitated by social platforms.
Organizational Culture and Change Management: Strategies for managing cultural transformation in the context of BPM.
Leadership and Engagement: The role of leadership in fostering a culture supportive of BPM and continuous improvement.
Employee Motivation in BPM: How incentives and rewards systems can align with BPM to improve job satisfaction and performance.
Skills Development in BPM: Addressing the evolving training and development needs within BPM practice.
Ethical BPM Practices: Ensuring fairness, transparency, and non-discrimination in BPM.
Diversity and Inclusion in BPM: Designing inclusive BPM practices that cater to diverse workforces and customer bases.


Workshop paper format
Position papers of up to 2500 words are sought. Position papers that raise relevant questions, or describe successful or unsuccessful practice, or describe experience will all be welcome. Position papers will be assigned a 20-minute presentation. Short papers of up to 1000 words can also be submitted and will be assigned a 10-minute presentation. Short papers will be published in separate CEUR proceedings.

Submission
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. The length of full papers must not exceed 12 pages (There is no possibility to buy additional pages). Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages. Papers should be submitted in the new LNBIP format (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-487211-0). Papers must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper/position paper/tool report).

Please use Easychair for submitting your paper:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/submissions?a=32035953


The paper selection will be based on the relevance of a paper to the main topics, as well as upon its quality and potential to generate relevant discussion. All the workshop papers will be published by Springer as a post-proceeding volume (to be sent around 4 months after the workshop) in their Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series.
Activities

All papers will be published on workshop wiki (www.bpms2.org) before the workshop, so that everybody can learn about the problems that are important for other participants. A blog will be used to encourage and support discussions. The workshop will consist of long and short paper presentations, brainstorming sessions and discussions. The workshop report will be created collaboratively using a wiki. A special issue over all workshops will be published in a journal (decision in progress).

Important dates

Deadline for workshop paper submissions:
June 7, 2024

Notification of Acceptance:
July 5, 2024

Camera-ready papers deadline:
July 19, 2024

Workshop:
September 1, 2024


Primary Contact
Rainer Schmidt
Munich University of Applied Sciences
Rainer.Schmidt@hm.edu
Phone: +49 89 1265 3740
Fax: + 49 89 1265 3780


Selmin Nurcan
Sorbonne Management School - University Paris 1
Panthéon-Sorbonne
Centre de Recherche en Informatique (CRI)
France
Selmin.Nurcan@univ-paris1.fr

Workshop Program Committee
Some invitations are still pending, and more people are expected:

Adriano Augusto, University of Melbourne
Marco Brambilla, Politecnico die Milano
Lars Brehm, Munich University of Applied Science
Norbert Gronau, University of Potsdam
Barbara Keller, Munich University of Applied Sciences
Kathrin Kirchner, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University
Michael Möhring, Munich University of Applied Sciences
Mohammad Ehson Rangiha, City University
Gustavo Rossi, LIFIA-F. Informatica. UNLP
Flavia Santoro, UERJ
Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala
Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa
Johannes Tenschert, FAU, Erlangen, Germany
Irene Vanderfeesten, Open University of the Netherlands
Moe Thandar Wynn, Queensland University of Technology
Alfred Zimmermann, Reutlingen University